By: Nathan Stoll | Source: googleblog.blogspot.com

In an effort to assist news publishers with control over which articles are included in Google News and how, Google has now added Sitemaps for Google News to its arrary of Webmaster Tools.

Now, English-language publishers who are currently included in Google News will be able to use their existing feeds — or define a more advanced Sitemap of their current news articles — to tell us exactly which articles they’d like us to crawl. While they’ve always been able to use technical solutions such as robots.txt to govern which portions of their sites Google crawls and indexes, this will give publishers more granular tools to tell our crawlers exactly what should be included.

Webmaster tools also offer publishers detailed information on the types of queries that lead visitors to various pages on a website, which can be helpful for understanding user information needs and access patterns.

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By: Autumn Davis | Source: webpronews.com

Verizon yellow pages launched a spin off of their popular SuperPages.com local search engine called Idearc.

Verizon’s Idearc began trading today at the New York Stock Exchange while Verizon YellowPages survives the spin off.

Idearc was intended by Verizon to be "a multi-platform media company with the most innovative ways of connecting buyers with sellers, making consumers better shoppers and businesses more successful."

The purpose of the site is to assist consumers in finding what they desire in a time efficient and simple manner and includes over 17 million businesses in the United States.

Because of parent company Verizon’s established reputation, with their print directories in over 35 million homes, Idearc already has an extensive consumer base.

Idearc also assists businesses in leading consumers to their products. The site even features a "value promise" to the businesses that place their ads on Idearc Yellow Pages, which states that they will make as many cost-effective solutions available as possible.

Average return on investments, or ROI, for companies who advertise their business on yellow pages is $21 for every $1 spent. Other forms of media, including newspaper and billboard, have proven to yield a much smaller ROI than those attained through online advertising.

Idearc is the official distributor of Verizon’s print directories, distributing 136 Verizon Yellow Pages and White Pages to 35 states per year.

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By: Justin Rosenstein | Source: googleblog.blogspot.com

Google has added 3 new features to their Google Page Creator. They are image editing, multiple sites and pages for mobile. The image-editing feature allows users to customize their photos.

Users have the options of cropping, rotating, adding color or reducing color and adding their own special effects. This should be a good feature when users have photos that may not need Photoshop. The multiple sites feature allows users to create up to 5 sites with different URLs.

Image editing: Now you can make a picture look just right in the context of your web page. Once you add a picture, crop, rotate, lighten, darken, and add crazy special effects to it right from within your browser.

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